NZ pulls Commonwealth funding

The Daily Mail reports:

Embattled Commonwealth chief Baroness Scotland’s hopes of keeping her job suffered a blow yesterday after a snub by a member country.

New Zealand has pulled the plug on its annual £2.5million funding for the Commonwealth Secretariat because of ‘significant weaknesses in its approach to managing procurement’, a spokesman for its foreign ministry said last night.

The rebuff emerged after £160,000-a-year Commonwealth Secretary General Baroness Scotland was strongly criticised by internal auditors for granting a lucrative consultancy contract to a firm run by a Labour Party friend.

The organisation’s audit committee accused her of ‘circumventing’ usual competitive tendering rules by awarding a £250,000 commission to KYA Global. 

The firm is owned by fellow Labour peer Lord Patel of Bradford, who served alongside Baroness Scotland as a minister in Gordon Brown’s government.

Lord Patel’s company was contracted to carry out a review of the secretariat. But the audit committee said the firm was ‘apparently insolvent’ at the time with debts of nearly £50,000.

New Zealand, one of the secretariat’s biggest contributors, made the decision to block funding last month. 

I’m surprised this hasn’t had more publicity in NZ.

Anyway good to see the NZ Government pulling the plug due to wasteful spending.

Hopefully funding will be restored once there is a new Secretary General.